REFUGEES WELCOME TO CATALONIA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE

lunes, 4 de julio de 2016

The radically simple way to make female refugees safer from sexual assault: decent bathrooms

For the tens of thousands of refugee women
trapped in Greece, daily life is made that much more treacherous by a
very basic problem: unsafe bathrooms.

Refugee camps tend to have too few bathrooms, which are often mixed and unprotected, making them hotspots for sexual attacks on women and girls. While there are no hard statistics, reported cases include German guards at a reception center peeping at women in the bathrooms and attempted rapes at bathrooms along the refugee trail.

At Idomeni, Greece’s largest informal refugee camp, which the authorities started clearing this week,
there were just 193 bathrooms and 84 showers for over 12,000 people,
according to Emmanuel Massart of Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Women
there told me they wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone, and not at all at
night.

The
lack of of safe, private washrooms feeds into a host of daily
indignities, women told me. Most of the refugees are from countries like
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, where women often cover their hair and
wear conservative clothing around strangers. Living and sleeping in the
often mixed quarters of overcrowded camps, they report, can mean being
unable to take off their hijab for weeks, developing skin rashes, and
avoiding food or drink so they don’t have to use bathrooms at night,
when they’re most at risk of harassment.

The stress of refugee life also affects menstrual
cycles. Women in camps in Greece told me that some of them experience
unusually heavy flows, while others have less frequent periods. Without
the privacy of a bathroom readily available, these stresses can be a
minefield to navigate. Many of the women are also used to using squat
toilets with water for washing, and find the Western-style seats in the
refugee camps unclean.

“We have learned from so many mistakes in the
past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if
they don’t have separate bathrooms,” says Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty
International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia. And yet in
Europe, where the humanitarian handbooks are often written, the
standards are not being met.

The lack of bathrooms is at least partly a
product of how Europe has handled the refugee crisis. At first, refugees
were spending only a few days in Greece at processing centers, cities,
and border towns, on their into western Europe. But in March Macedonia
closed its border with Greece, blocking the Balkan route to Germany.
Then Turkey and the EU signed a controversial deal
to stem the refugee flows, leaving 53,000 refugees stuck in dire
conditions in Greece—a country already on the economic brink. Greek
authorities had never made Idomeni into a formal camp, so just to put in
bathrooms and showers, MSF had to rent the land from a local farmer.

Last
month, under the EU-Turkey deal, Greek authorities turned Moria transit
center on the island of Lesbos into a closed detention site.
Journalists cannot enter, but conversations with several women through
the fence at Moria, where more than 3,000 people are held, relayed a
bleak scene. One 17-year-old Syrian woman told me the bathrooms were
always flooded or broken, or the water cut, and there was nowhere safe
for women and girls like her to go.

But not far from Moria there is an example of how
to do it right. In Kara Tepe, an open facility for nearly 1,000
vulnerable people who have been moved from Moria, the International
Rescue Committee (IRC) has built a washing area with signs that clearly
designate well-lit, gender-separated washing areas. The women’s spacious
side has shower rooms, a mix of squat and western toilets, and a place
to wash clothes.

The bathrooms at Kara Tepe, with clearly marked and separated areas for men and women.(Miriam Berger for Quartz)

As
they dismantle Idomeni, Greek authorities are moving refugees to dozens
of new camps they are setting up. The IRC is working to implement a
Kara Tepe-like model in at least six of these camps. Many of the new
sites are in remote areas without water and electricity supplies. But as
pressures on Greece grow, so will pushes to cut costs— which often hit
women first.

In the meantime, Europe’s chaotic responses to
the refugee crisis means that thousands are still stuck in squalor. Safe
bathrooms won’t fix the traumas wrought by war and politics, but they
can make an enormous difference to women who, in their attempt to escape
those traumas, are ending up vulnerable to sexual assault and other
dangers instead.